The last time I briefly spoke to my former schoolmate Talha was just after we completed our A-Level exams in the summer of 1998 at the prestigious private school Dulwich College in southeast London. After spending nearly six years in a British jail awaiting extradition to America on terrorist charges, Syed Talha Ahsan has now faced extradition to America after losing his appeal at the European Court of Human Rights, alongside four other terrorist suspects including the radical preacher Abu Hamza.

If the government is serious about Qatada's terrorist credentials - and it should be - they should be pursuing a solid legal effort to put the al-Qaeda puppet master behind bars for good, in this country, under specific charges that address the totality of his support for mass death.

Babar Ahmad, Talha Ahsan and even Abu Hamza have rights. The demonisation of Abu Hamza has clouded the entire extradition process in the media. Abu Hamza, although outspoken, vociferous and vilified by the media has been used to cover up the injustice that has taken place here.

Extradition, in other words, does nothing for the fight against terrorism. On the contrary, it is a self-serving red-herring designed to conceal the dubious systemic failures of British and American security agencies from public knowledge, while vindicating their unaccountable powers to override the rule of law.

Trolling recently got a lot of media coverage after a 21 year-old Swansea University student, Liam Stacey, was jailed for 56 days for tweeting various racist and offensive comments following the footballer Fabrice Muamba's cardiac arrest.

Last week, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that six alleged terror suspects could face extradition to the United States. While extensive media coverage have been given to Abu Hamza, who has been convicted of soliciting to murder and stirring up racial hatred and jailed in the UK for seven years, the voices of Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan were almost silent.

About Abu Hamza

On 24 September Abu Hamza's appeal against extradition failed. He is expected to be sent to America soon. The Radical cleric was jailed in the UK for seven years for soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred in February 2006.
He is currently being held in the maximum-security Belmarsh prison in Woolwich, south-east London. It has been suggested that racial abuse of his son turned him into a critic of Western life.
In 1990 he divorced his wife and returned to Egypt where he reinvented himself as a Muslim "holy man" or sheikh. He travelled to Pakistan and then on to Afghanistan which was at the time gripped by civil war as differing factions fought to fill the power vacuum left by the retreat of Russian troops.
It is unclear if he fought there but when he returned to the UK with his British passport in the early 1990s he was missing his right hand and an eye. He claims he lost the hand fighting jihad in Afghanistan.